Buried amid the chaos of the Biden regime, which has only been in power for roughly four months, is actually some good news if you take it the right way.
Simply put, Biden's diminished mental state coupled with his left-wing handlers' tanking of the economy and pathetically weak foreign policy have created one crisis after another, each of them reminding us why we need to be prepared for the collapse of our country and society in general.
First the most obvious: The fact that more than 15,000 gas stations up and down the East Coast ran out after the major fuel artery supplying them was offline for just a few days.
More stations were out of gas in Florida, Maryland, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Mississippi early on May 13 compared to the night of May 12, according to GasBuddy.
In Florida, 30 percent of 7,564 stations were out of fuel as of 6 a.m. Central Time. In Maryland, 34 percent of the state’s 1,869 stations could no longer serve customers. More than half of South Carolina’s 3,084 stations ran out of gas, along with 34 percent of Tennessee’s stations. Seven percent of Mississippi’s stations are out of gas compared to 6 percent the night prior.
Additionally, more than 70 percent of stations in North Carolina, the state hardest hit by the shutting down of the pipeline, and more than half of stations in Virginia also ran out of fuel and had to shut down. What's more, stations in those two states were hit the hardest -- and the fastest.
The East Coast is home to more than one-third of the U.S. population. Combined, the region generates close to half of our country's annual gross domestic product, so you can quickly understand how vital that third of the U.S. is to the survival and viability of the rest of the country.
Now, all said, as of this writing, the pipeline has been restarted, but it's going to take days and perhaps weeks to resupply the East Coast's depleted fuel stocks, just as the summer driving and travel season approaches.
Tom Kloza, founder of the Oil Price Information Service, said the restart “means that the deluge of rain is over, but the ‘river crest’ of station outages probably arrives tomorrow or Friday.”
“Friday is always the busiest day for purchasing gasoline,” he added in a tweet.
However, Gas Buddy analyst Patrick De Haan said that motorists in the Carolinas, Virginia, and Georgia could see outages lasting as long as two weeks.
And, of course, there is going to be price fallout, as noted in Virginia, where at least one station is charging seven bucks a gallon.
"I had half a tank of gas, so when it got to $25, I started looking to see what was going on. And after I got to $30, I was like, 'oh my God! I spent $35.45 to fill up my tank. Six gallons of gas for $35. That's absolutely ridiculous," said one customer, Lether Kerney, adding "Usually, it's under $3.00. This BP service station has always been the cheapest, and I didn’t even look at the price before I started pumping."
"You can't do that to people," said another customer who went by "Cha Cha."
Now, just imagine if the attack on Colonial had been a legitimate cyberattack instead of just a ransomware assault? A cyberattack would have knocked out vital electronic infrastructure, maybe even causing the entire system to self-destruct. Attacks like that would mean years' worth of pipeline reconstruction and repair, while in the meantime there wouldn't be enough trucks and rail lines for months to replace the volume.
What would you do? You can't store enough gasoline for 2-3 years, so you'd have to come up with an alternative -- maybe even an electric back-up vehicle so you could at least get to work.
Something to think about after the worse fuel disruption in the U.S. since the gas shortages of the 1970s.
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